Review of Avengers: Impossible City by Jed Mackay
The Avengers: Impossible City is the first volume of Jed Mackay and C.F. Villa's Avengers run, and includes #1-6 of the series, as well as the prologue issue, Timeless #1. I haven't read an Avengers run since Hickman's (2012-2015) and I was excited to jump on to a new story with a new creative team.
Let's start with the prologue. It's a solid story centring on time-traveller Kang the Conqueror's search for 'the missing moment.' It's intriguing, setting up several solid mysteries for the Avengers series. MacKay writes a great Kang, capturing perfectly the mad man's genius, arrogance, and spite. Finishing the prologue left me excited to get into the series proper, but that's where things fell apart.
Figuring out a fresh angle for the Avengers has got to be difficult and I'm not necessarily against MacKay's angle for his series, centring around Carol Danvers a.k.a Captain Marvel as their leader. Their mission statement: the Avengers are firefighters. They save lives because they can. There's no grander goal than that for now. Unfortunately what follows is severely hindered by both pacing and a lack of solid character dynamics.
MacKay captures the voice of these characters well, but there isn't enough character conflict here for anything more than the odd appreciation for a cool one-liner or splash page.
The premise of this first arc revolves around the attack of Ashen Combine and their Impossible City (a space-faring city-ship) on earth. Credit where it's due--the Ashen Combine are seriously creepy villains, both in design, powers, and motivation. It was also good fun seeing the different Avengers going up against the Combine individually, but the invasion was spread out across four whole issues. Decompression and slow pacing feels like an problem here. There just wasn't enough story happening issue-to-issue, and I feel like if I'd been buying this series monthly, I would've been bored to death. As it is, a collection like this is the best way to experience this story as there's no wait between chapters.
The action needed to be punchier, and faster paced. This would've left room for emotional fallout and character beats, of which there are few. I was really looking forward to seeing Carol's leadership challenged in a significant way. I hope we do at some point, because as it stands she's kind of a blank slate when she should be the most interesting character, seeing as we spend most of our time with her.
Overall, the collection is a bit of a let-down, but I do think the series has promise thanks to the plot threads and mysteries currently hanging from the prologue.
P.S. Vision and Wanda are both recruited to be on this iteration of the Avengers, but they don't speak a word of dialogue to each other. Weren't they married?? It feels weird, and highlights the lack of inter-character dynamics in this volume.
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